ExaGrid growing in parallel, adds global GRID back-up to appliance software

simpler solution

If storing the most recent backup not in dedupe'd form the obvious solution to me is to write the data to a staging area that is not on the dedupe appliance then send it to dedupe after (rather than replace the entire backup infrastructure). I do this with our MySQL backups and HP StoreOnce (NFS). We use Percona xtrabackup for our MySQL backups and for our biggest backups sending that data directly to StoreOnce exceeds the # of open file handles(as of last year anyway, haven't checked recent software versions) that it can support over NFS. So I write the data to another location on our 3PAR and rsync the data to StoreOnce (currently getting about 32:1 dedupe, blows the pants off the ~5.5:1 we were getting with ZFS before).

But perhaps if you rely on VTL or something to backup it gets more complicated, for me everything is file based, no fancy backup programs(all scripts with integrated alerting), no fancy protocols(all NFS). I do plan to deploy tape this year(for offline archiving), and intend to use LTFS (over NFS) for that.

I love the marketing spin in the industry

The customer's quote is funny to say the least. "recovery process was long and complicated."

What exactly was complicated? The data is restored in its native format to however it was written. Ergo, you restore no different than exagrid or any other dedupe appliance. How much of that was coached, vs customer words?

Add to that, many many times product swap outs are people coming of an aging platform, going to a new HW platform. How old was the "DataDomain," they were replacing vs the newest iteration of Exagrid? Not exactly apples to apples here. But I guess if you agree to be a reference customer and the vendor gives you free equipment, you'll say whatever you are told to say...

At the end of the day though, this grid enhancement is huge for Exagrid. But 700 customers is not tooting your horn either.

<-- Has been a reference customer and has played the game of free HW, or PS, more than once, and sold my soul to say positive things. But hey free is free, and I can live with that if it helped the business and solved a business challenge.

Landing Zone = total BS

Who believes this asinine argument? So primary storage deduplication isn't a good idea? XtremIO and Pure doing inline dedupe are slow pieces of junk? How about any kind of RAID? Or WAFL, CASL, ZFS, that "confuses" your random writes into sequential writes? Let's also banish multiplexing in a backup application! All data must be stored in its original form! Filesystems are dead. Volume managers are dead. RAID is dead. Applications must talk directly to LBAs and deal with defragmentation.